Month: May 2016

Glenda Martin

Glenda Martin, the Career Development Consultant in Ulster University, gave a talk about CVs, Cover Letter and employability in general. Glenda is based in the Career development centre on the second floor of the library. Glenda talked about the Career development centre and the various ways it can help, including:

Career Management Modules

Employer Events/Talks

Information, Advice and Guidance

Online Tools and Resources (‘My Career’ section of the UU portal)

Career Masterclasses programme with employer insights.

Top 10 Desirable skills for employment:

Commercial awareness

Communication

Teamwork

Confidence

Problem Solving

Attention to detail and accuracy

Organisation

Motivation and Perseverance

Ability to cope with pressure

Negotiation and persuasion

Application Forms:

Ensuring that your Skills, Abilities, Knowledge and Experience (SAKE) fit the person or job’s specification is vital to a good application form.

It is important to research the company, its mission statement, markets, products, expansions, development and values.

The form should be filled in as instructed and thoroughly checked for spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes (possibly by another person). It is important to keep a spare copy of the form to read it before the interview.

USP (Unique Selling Point)

Identify three things about yourself that make you the best candidate for the job.

CV

When writing a CV it is important to list your skills in such a way that they are applicable for the job in question. It can be helpful to provide evidence of these skills.

The CV should be presented in a logical order, in a layout and design appropriate to the role you are applying for. You should sell yourself using positive verbs with the most prevailing, powerful words to the left hand side.

What to include in your CV:

Personal details

Skill profile

Career Objective

Achievements

Interests

Education

Employment history

Referees

Interviews

In an interview, it is important to be positive, show enthusiasm and smile, and to allow the interviewer to easily obtain information.

When answering Interview Questions, find a suitable scenario from your own experiences which reflects the key skills being asked for. The STAR mnemonic is helpful in these questions:

Situation – What was the situation?

Task – What did you do?

Action – How did you complete the task? What steps were taken?

Result – What was the outcome?

In an interview, impressions are as important as what you say. It has been said that only 7% of the interview is decided by your words, 38% by your tone of voice and 55% by your body language. It is important to ask a question at the end of any interview, such as “Are there opportunities for an employee to grow within your company?”

James Baker is a freelance story and visual development artist who has worked on an impressive line-up of projects including Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, The Boxtrolls and Inside Out.

This was our first time talking to a story artist, and he talked from a different perspective than an animator or digital effect artist. James had a fun story from his time working on Finding Nemo about how one of his proxy voices for the crab in in Finding Nemo was left in the finished movie.

Karin Cooper is a creature supervisor from Industrial Light and Magic who recently helped to create the bear from The Revenant. I was very excited to hear this talk as I had just watched The Revenant at the cinema the previous day. Most of Karin’s talk was about her career and experiences, from her beginnings to where she is now. Many of the questions asked were directed towards technical facts about The Revenant

Gerard Dunleavy is a graduate of the Animation Masters course currently working in London for MPC. Gerard’s award-winning Masters showreel is shown above. which was the winning entry for International CG Student of the year 2012.

Gerard talked about his experiences in the industry, from starting his course to his current position.

Niall Carlin is the director of DoubleJump Studios. As a self-employed animator it was interesting to see what his approach to the industry is.

A major phrase that Niall used in the talk was “Don’t ask how, ask why!”. He went on to explain that asking how something done will only get you the technical know-how needed to replicate it, but by asking why you can learn a lot more about the artist’s intentions behind this approach.

Although I have written a CV before I found quickly that an animation CV is a bit different to a standard cv. One of my biggest concerns was what info to put on it and what info to leave out. Here is some of the research that I found more useful.

A little basic but a great guidance video nonetheless. This video is not specific to animation but it is very good at explaining the basics of making a good CV intruding the dos and don’ts

Some of these designs are very cool and creative but some are tacky and gimmicky. This shows me that it is good to have a visual style but not to go to over the top as that can put people off your entire CV

To be completely honest, until I did this research and sat the class on it, I had no idea what a cover letter was and was completely confused as to what went on the cover letter rather than the CV. Here are some of the best pieces of research that I found on the topic of cover letters.

Simple and easy to follow it helped me to understand what it is that makes up a cover letter

In this scene; there is an Elite struggling in a life or death battle with a huge creature called a Farled. The tall height that the Elite was so proud of is nothing compared to this monster’s and the Elite cowards in fear before it.

Camera: we incorporated low angle camera techniques when creating shots of the monster to making it appear intimating and low angle camera techniques to show the Elite from above which visually and symbolically makes the Elite appear vulnerable.

Concepts- this model is base from earlier concept art with a few minor alterations that the team wanted and felt were more consistent with the current artistic direction.

The sculpts

The model was made on Maya then moved to mud box. The detail and texture was then added here and a bump map is made based of this.

I made a range of custom brushes for this model .

Rigging- I use my spider rig from before and with some minor modification; it could be used for this model.

Edits

Longer legs- upon seeing this scene; Kevin gave us feedback and told us that he liked the model but he felt that the proportions were not exaggerated enough and that they needed to be edited and stretched out.

Concepts- the model is based from this concept art however the team also wanted some minor changes to it.

The Sculpts

I used a custom scale brush for the skin.

mapping

Retopologizing these model was difficult because of its unconventional shape, however understanding the pipeline was crucial to completing both of these model.

Edits

I modelled the beak of the creature in one part but the planned scene was changed to having its mouth open. As there would be a huge amount of reconstructing to do and I felt the head one of the weaker elements of the model, I designed to make a new head from scratch was a large open mouth

I sculpted all the props in the product, by first modelling on maya then moving them to mudbox for texturing. The texture is made in hi-ploy and then a bump map was created based on the textured model and added to the low polly modelled making it quick to render.

The staff of the king is meant to emit a dark power from it and I opted to create it using nparticle. By setting the weight to to a minus number I made them gently spread out, float and fade into the distance.